Jerry Alan Fodor (born 1935) is an American
philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds
the position of State of New Jersey Professor
of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is
the author of many works in the fields of
philosophy of mind and cognitive science,
in which he has laid the groundwork for the
modularity of mind and the language of thought
hypotheses, among other ideas. He is known
for his provocative and sometimes polemical
style of argumentation. Fodor argues that
mental states, such as beliefs and desires,
are relations between individuals and mental
representations. He maintains that these
representations can only be correctly explained
in terms of a language of thought (LOT) in
the mind. Furthermore, this language of thought
itself is an actually existing thing that
is codified in the brain and not just a useful
explanatory tool. Fodor adheres to a species
of functionalism, maintaining that thinking
and other mental processes consist primarily
of computations operating on the syntax of
the representations that make up the language
of thoug
Jerry Fodor on mental states From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia Jerry Fodor's
views
on the nature of mental states emerge
out
of his rejection of two traditional
competing
hypotheses which are summarized (along
with
his criticisms) in this article.
Given that Fodor accepts the relational
nature
of intentional attitudes, his first
step
is to try to clear the field of those
who
deny such a nature. Some authors, in
fact,
sustain the position (which Fodor calls
the
hypothesis of fusion) for which intentional
attitudes are really "monadic"
mental states. According to this view,
"Simon
believes that the Morning Star is Venus"
expresses a mental state characterized
by
an individual "Simon" and
a unary
predicate "believes-that-the-
Morning-Star-is-Venus"
in which the verb of believing is semantically
fused with the object of belief. Fodor
presents
several arguments, of which I will
cite just
two, against this thesis:
1) There are a very large number of
sentences
of the form a believes complement.
If all
these sentences are atomic, how could
human
beings possibly learn English? (Fodor
attributes
this to Davidson, 1965).
2) Different propositional attitudes
frequently
converge on the same content: e. g.,
one
can both fear and believe that it will
rain
on Tuesday. But, according to the fusion
thesis, except for the reference to
John,
"John fears that it will rain
on Tuesday"
has nothing in common with "John
believes
that it will rain on Tuesday."
In particular,
the fact that the form of the words
"it
will rain on Tuesday" occurs in
both
sentences is just an accident. [1]
The Carnapian
view
Fodor concludes that this position
is "hopeless."
But it remains for Fodor to deal with
the
second, and more common, position of
intentional
attitude attributions as two-place
relations.
Fodor further subdivides this alternative
into two separate theses. The first,
attributed
to Rudolf Carnap, considers mental
states
as relations between individuals and
sentences
of natural language; the second, attributed
to Gottlob Frege, considers the relation
to be between individuals and propositions.
The position expressed by Carnap in
Meaning
and Necessity, taken up by Hartry Field
in
1978 [2]and Gilbert Harman in 1982,
[3]is
interesting because it seeks to maintain
the intuition that mental states are
relational,
without the necessity of any ontological
commitment with respect to such conceptually
troublesome entities as mental representations.
[4]Fodor presents several arguments
which
he believes justifies its rejection.
First,
he suggests that Carnap's theory is
fundamentally
behavioristic. Carnap, that is, has
one theory
regarding the objects of intentional
attitudes
and a second theory regarding the character
of the relation of individuals with
such
objects. The second theory is behavioristic
because, for Carnap, "to believe
such
and such is to be disposed ... in specifiable
conditions... to proffer occurrences
of the
correspondent of the sentences which
attribute
beliefs. But, patently, beliefs are
not behavioural
dispositions and, a fortiori, are not
dispositions
to proffer anything." In simpler
terms,
since behaviourism is presumably false,
then
there must be something wrong in some
part
of Carnap's explanation of propositional
attitudes. But Fodor also has some
more interesting
and persuasive criticisms to level
at the
Carnapian view. His second argument
is to
the effect that Carnap's theory can
most
naturally be read as a theory which
considers
the type-identity of the correspondents
of
sentences which attribute beliefs as
necessary
and sufficient conditions for the type-identity
of the beliefs actually attributed
since
Carnap was primarily concerned with
the opacity
of beliefs. His approach, therefore,
was
based on a strategy of inheriting the
opacity
of beliefs from the opacity of citations.
The problem is that this strategy fails
in
every case in which the identity conditions
of beliefs are different from the identity
conditions for sentences. For example,
it
is likely that the sentences "Phil
believes
that Alice shot Fred" and "Phil
believes that Fred was shot by Alice"
attribute type-identical beliefs. But
they
are clearly not type-identical sentences.
Fodor points out that a way around
this problem
would be to admit that objects of belief
are, essentially, systems of translations
of sentences. But this results in circularity.
One way of characterizing the relation
of
translation between sentences is by
reference
to the communicative intentions of
speakers-hearers.
But we cannot then "identify the
translations
in reference to the intentions while,
simultaneously,
individuating the propositional attitudes
(including intentions) in reference
to the
translations. Along the same lines,
one can
believe that it is raining without
being
able to speak English. This implies,
once
again, that objects of belief must
be systems
of translation and we end up in something
like the circle described above. Fodor's
solution is to abandon the idea that
propositional
attitudes are relations between individuals
and sentences of natural languages
while
not abandoning the idea that they are
relations
between individuals and sentences tout
court.
He proposes that the relation is between
individuals and internal sentences,
or systems
of mental representations. The view
of Frege
But before proposing his own alternative,
Fodor still needs to deal with the
second
relational hypothesis mentioned above:
that
of Frege, which consists in the idea
that
intentional attitudes are relations
between
individuals and objective and abstract
propositions.
Such propositions, according to Frege,
are
completely independent from codification
in either mental representations or
in the
representations of natural language.
The
anti-psychologism which underlies this
position
is well known: according to Frege,
in fact,
it is necessary to distinguish the
thought
which constitutes the sense ("Sinn")
of a sentence from its representation
in
the mind of the speaker. As he writes
in
Über Sinn und Bedeutung (1892), mental
representations
are subjective: "The same representation
is not always tied to the same sense,
even
in the same person. The representation
is
subjective, varying from person to
person...
A painter, a coachman and a zoologist
will
probably connect very different representations
to the name "Bucefalus."
The representation
essentially distinguishes itself from
the
sense of a sign. The sense can be common
possession of many people and it not
a part
or mode of the individual psyche. It
is impossible
to deny that humanity has a common
patrimony
of thoughts which are transmitted from
generation
to generation." [5] The fact that
thoughts
are not representations, nevertheless,
does
not mean that they have a nature similar
to objects in the external world. In
order
to account for the peculiarity of their
nature,
it is necessary to appeal to a "third
realm" outside of both the mental
and
the physical. But this leaves open
the epistemological
problem of how it is possible for an
individual
human mind to gain access to such abstract
objects of the third realm. As Fodor
puts
it: "The main reason for which
one simply
cannot say 'propositional attitudes
are relations
with propositions. Period' is that
I don't
understand it. I don't see how it is
possible
for an organism to be in relation (in
an
epistemically interesting way) with
a proposition
except through standing in a (causal/functional)
relation with some occurrence of a
formula
which expresses the proposition. Plato
maintains
that there is a special intellectual
faculty
with which one can look at abstract
objects.
Frege says that we grasp (that which
I call)
propositions, but I have not found
any theory
which explains what it means to "grasp"
a proposition, other than the observation
(in Frege, 1918) that it is not a perception
of the senses because its objects are
abstract
and it is not introspection because
its objects
are not mental. (Frege also says that
grasping
a proposition is not the same as grasping
a hammer. Obviously not.) [6] The difficulty
illustrated by Fodor is of both an
empirical
and a conceptual nature. What is at
issue
is the question of the psychological
plausibility
of theories: the point, in other words,
is
that it doesn't seem possible to determine
the nature of mental content only in
the
abstract, without taking into consideration
the conditions which render that content
empirically plausible (specifying,
for example,
how a physical system must be constituted
in order for it to be able to instantiate
them). Given this empirical limit to
conceptual
speculation, that which is necessary
is some
mechanism capable of elaborating mental
content.
The contact with hypothetical entities
of
the third realm by way of an unspecified
technique of grasping seems to exclude
this
possibility for Fodor. Fodor's solution
The difficulties left open by the problem
of grasping disappear immediately, according
to Fodor, as soon as one brings in the notion
of mental representation. Following the standard
version, for example, to think of Mary is
to be in relation with an internal representation
(with an idea) of Mary. But to adhere to
this version does not mean, however, that
rather than Mary, it is the mental representation
that is thought of; to be in relation with
the idea of Mary, in other words, does not
exclude the possibility of being in relation
with Mary, the person. Considering mental
states to be triadic relations, representative
realism makes it possible, according to Fodor,
to hold together all of the elements necessary
to the solution of the problem, putting an
end to the questions generated by the alternative
conceptions. Mental representations, moreover,
are not only the immediate objects of beliefs,
but also constitute the domain over which
mental processes operate. From this perspective,
they can be considered the ideal conjunctive
link between the formal/syntactic conception
of content and the computational conception
of the functional architecture which represents,
according to Fodor, our best explanation
of mental processes.
References
^ Fodor, Jerry A. (1981). Representations:
Philosophical Essays on the Foundations
of
Cognitive Science. The MIT Press. ^
Frege, Gottlob (1973). La Struttura Logica
del Linguaggio. Bompiani. ^
